On Wednesday, 9 December 1998,
     MIKE RUSKAI wrote to IVAN TODOROSKI about Guess who's back... ;)

 MS>> wasn't it PC who added a second thread to EACH application in the
 IT>> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
 MS>> system? or something else added to the system with WARP4. at least

 IT>> Hey?! That's EXACTLY what I'm seeing here! You think PC did that? I
 IT>> never bothered to check it without PC, but as you (and others) say
 IT>> that they haven't seen such a thing on their machines, I believe
 IT>> you.

 MR> I've got two machines with Warp 4 installed, but at FP7 level.  Only one
 MR> has Process Commander, and only one has that extra time critical thread.

 MR> The conclusion is that it's pretty damn likely :)

   Yup... I had another unfortunate accident with one of my drives and
   lost Process Commander (and with it the additional thread) in the
   process. So I guess I'm pretty convinced by now...

 IT>> I stand corrected... It seems that there IS a certain amount of
 IT>> black magic involved after all. It really does "who knows
what".
 IT>> :)

 MR> Something you need to understand is that DosSetPriority() will
 MR> only work on the current process and its children.

   Yes, I am quite aware of this

 MR> Process Commander replaces PMSHELL.EXE (for the first copy),
 MR> presumably so that it can be the parent process of all other
 MR> running processes.

   That's what I think too... I once even set out to write a program
   that would replace the PMSHELL in the RUNWORKPLACE statement. When
   started it would first setup a pipe and a separate thread to listen
   for commands for changing priorities from other processes, and then
   it would start the original PMSHELL.EXE (thus becoming its parent,
   and grand-parent of most of the processes, and would be able to
   change the priorities of almost any app started by the user). But I
   never finished it, because I found PC in the meantime :)

 MR> For the extra thread, I am not certain.  It might have something
 MR> to do with its process kill feature, or it might be a sneaky way

  Not likely, because there is another utility, ukill9.zip from Hobbes,
  which uses the xf86sup.sys driver from XFree86/OS2 (found in the same
  package) to implement some kind of hard kill functionality, much like
  the Unix "kill -9". It is quite effective, even kills processes which
  get stuck in the exitlist(!), and it doesn't use any additional
  threads.

 MR> to use DosSetPriority() for processes which are for some reason
 MR> not child processes of PMSHELL.EXE (the first copy).

 Those would be only the processes started with "RUN=..." statements
 from CONFIG.SYS and detached processes. But it can't change their
 priority, so I guess it isn't it either...

                                                            - Ivan -

.!. Ah.. aah.. aaah.. atchou=2+O#:+/&b+o NO CARRIER
--- Terminate 5.00/Pro [OS/2]
 þ TerMail/QWK þ